184 REFINE AND REHEARSE
artistic achievements—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and
The Beatles [White Album]—is ten years.”^11
With the ten-thousand-hours theory in mind, let’s turn our
attention once again to Jobs. Although Apple was founded in
1976, Jobs and friend-cofounder Steve Wozniak started attending
meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1974. Homebrew
was an early computer-hobbyist club in Silicon Valley, California.
It was at Homebrew that Jobs began tinkering and talking about
how computers could change the world. Exactly ten years later,
Jobs gave an outstanding presentation—the introduction of the
Macintosh in 1984. Most people who saw that presentation con-
sider it to be a magnificent achievement, packed with suspense,
drama, and excitement. But remarkably, Jobs continued to prac-
tice, refine, and improve his presentation style.
A decade later, in 1997, Jobs had returned to Apple and was
onstage at Boston’s Macworld to discuss the steps he had taken to
restore Apple to health. Everything about his performance that
day was more polished and natural than it had been in previous
years. He had lost the lectern, walking comfortably across the
stage, and had started creating more visually engaging slides.
Flash forward another ten years to Macworld 2007, which,
in my opinion, is Jobs’s greatest presentation to date if you take
into account every element of the keynote from start to finish.
He hits home runs in every presentation, but he hit a bases-
loaded homer in 2007. Everything clicked. Several sections of
the presentation have been discussed throughout this book. The
overall presentation was smooth and polished, with dramatic
highs and lows, confident body language, captivating verbal
delivery, and gorgeous slides. The iPhone announcement had
even overshadowed every product at the vastly larger Consumer
Electronics Show, held the same week in Las Vegas.
The chief misconception about Jobs is that he is a natural
presenter, that he was born with the charisma that he exhibits
onstage. Not true. As research has shown, nobody is a natural.
You can achieve the same level of proficiency of the world’s
greatest communicators if you work at it much, much harder
than everyone else.